Narrative Agency Research Articles

Agency and Communion in Brief Entire Life Narratives Across the Life Span

ABSTRACTObjectiveThe evolving life story is integral to personality, and motivational themes are central features of the life story. Personality implies individual differences that are relatively stable over time, but still allow for developmental processes. This study explored both long‐term stability and developmental change in thematic content of the life story.MethodFulfilled and unfulfilled agency and communion were studied in brief entire life narratives across 4 measurements in 12 years in a cohort‐sequential design including six cohorts (n = 172; age 8–77).ResultsFulfilled agency and communion, as well as unfulfilled agency exhibited moderate rank order stability over 4 and 8 years, fulfilled communion showed even a modest 12‐year stability, whereas unfulfilled communion displayed an unsystematic pattern. Developmentally, multilevel analyses revealed an inverted U‐shaped association between age and both fulfilled and unfulfilled agency, peaking in mid‐life. Fulfilled communion declined after emerging adulthood, but unexpectedly did not increase again in old age. Unfulfilled communion showed no systematic age trends. Girls and women told life narratives with more fulfilled and unfulfilled communion, whereas genders did not differ in either kind of agency.ConclusionThe content of the life story exhibits rank‐order stability over time and systematic mean‐level development across the life span.

Joy, adaptation, and agency in the resilience narratives of primary caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in profound educational, occupational, and familial challenges for school-aged children and their primary caregivers. During this transitional period, resilience was often featured in pandemic discourse as a solution to managing these unprecedented shifts. However, very little concrete information was provided as to how caregivers should or could mobilize this oft-cited resource. Our qualitative study was designed to explore how primary caregivers survived or thrived, using resilience as an experiential window through which to better understand how they coped with the complex, unprecedented challenges ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic. One-hour interviews were conducted with caregivers (n = 22, all but two identified as female). Analysis revealed that primary caregivers understood resilience to be surviving the pandemic and making it through with the fewest scars for both them and their children. Caregivers cultivated resilience through finding joy during the hardships, supporting their children’s adaptations to the changing context, and resisting rules. Surviving the pandemic required resilience, and while this emerged in caregivers’ definitions, their lived experience highlights how joy, supporting adaptations, and resistance were employed to cultivate resilience.

“I Changed After the Death”: Symptoms of Psychopathology Predict Lower Agency and Communion Themes in Loss Narratives Over 16 Months

Abstract Purpose Some individuals struggle to adjust after the death of a close other. Constructing an adaptive narrative about the loss is important to adjustment but symptoms of psychopathology may interfere with this process. We examined whether psychopathology symptoms measured 2 months after the loss of a spouse or parent predicted loss narratives with lower agency and communion themes as well as more negative emotional tone and self-event connections. Method Participants included 507 adults from the Aarhus Bereavement Study who completed psychopathology symptom measures at 2, 6, 11, and 18 months after the death of their spouse or parent. Symptom measures included prolonged grief disorder (PGD), PTSD, depression, and anxiety. Eighteen months after the death, participants wrote a narrative about the loss and answered questions about its emotional qualities (i.e., tone, self-event connections). The narratives were content coded for agency and communion themes. Results Multiple regressions showed that higher PGD symptoms at 2 months predicted less adaptive loss narratives at 18 months, even after controlling for neuroticism and age. Conclusion Individuals who experience high symptom levels are struggling to construct adaptive loss narratives. This may hinder identity changes needed to accommodate their altered life circumstances.

‘People need support and society needs change’: vulnerability and collective agency in queer youth organization

ABSTRACT The present article draws on narrative interviews with 16 young queer people who are involved in organizing meeting places and activities for and with other queers. Here, I explore how queer youth describe their needs and motives for engaging in organizing, and how narratives of agency and vulnerability are expressed and intertwined. Drawing on Judith Butler (2016. ‘Rethinking vulnerability and resistance’, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti, and L. Sabsay (Ed.), Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke University Press), I argue that vulnerability among LGBTQ + youth is not the opposite of resistance and that agency is not the opposite of exposedness. In this context, LGBTQ + youth’s own acknowledgement of and collective resistance to dominant sexuality and gender norms, which put them at risk for exclusion, offence and violence, constitute a mobilization of vulnerability. The motives for organizing are described as three narratives concerning social needs and how queer youth relate themselves to a collective. The first narrative recognizes the person’s need for other people, the second other people’s need for them, and the third concerns the need for a community. The results show how queer youth use collective agency to create their own spaces and communities as well as to formulate and practice resistance.

Commodification anxiety and the memory of Turkish revolutionary Deniz Gezmiş

This article examines the impact of commodification on the memory-activism nexus in relation to the cultural afterlife of Deniz Gezmiş. It reframes discussions of the ‘commodification’ of the revolutionary in terms of ‘celebrification’ and examines why this process generates social unease in Turkey. It shows that this anxiety emerges from the perception that once memory is brought into the circuit of exchange-value, it risks losing its use-value in activism. Cultural memory is indeed becoming increasingly mediated by market relations. Yet, this article calls attention to activist remembrance which occurs within the interstices of capitalist property relations and is therefore not necessarily dependent on the market. As such, it supports a shift from the ‘passive consumer’ paradigm to the recognition of the political and narrative agency of remembering subjects, demonstrating that people often contest processes of commodification, especially in the context of anti-capitalist activism.

‘I’m not going to feed the bailiffs’: personal bankruptcy and debtor agency in narrative accounts of struggling debtors

ABSTRACT The article uses the formal instrument of personal bankruptcy proceedings as an illuminating context to contribute to the scholarship on the lived experience of overindebtedness. Through the analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with heavy debtors living in Czechia, we provide a focus on debtor agency, exploring how bankruptcy interrelates with how struggling debtors narratively approach debt and construct their capacity to act. We show that first-hand accounts of (planned) participation in a bankruptcy proceeding contain a surprising number and variety of narratives of agency. Emphasizing the processual character of bankruptcy proceedings, we demonstrate that bankruptcy supports enactments of debtor agency by interfering in the temporal ordering of debt as performed by the struggling debtors, shaping the experiences of overindebtedness also among those debtors who have not (yet) entered the formal process. We show that the narrative constructions of agency as regards bankruptcy are often embedded in a neoliberal discourse of merit and self-responsibilization. While the respondents reproduce a largely depoliticized and individualized account of debt resistance that at times operates with a hierarchization of struggling debtors, disclosing bankruptcy (intentions) to others also evokes spontaneous and unorganized acts of solidarity within personal networks that empower debtors.

Hearing Animals’ Stories: Interspecies Bond in Sanjeev Upreti’s Hansa

This paper analyzes Sanjeev Upreti’s Hansa (Duck), published in 2076 BS (2019 AD) from the perspective of Literary Animal Studies with a major objective of unveiling the author’s awareness of the exigency of an equitable and sustainable animal-human bond in the contemporary Anthropocene. The novel unfolds twin narratives in which one is a human protagonist and another a duck. In both narratives, stories of animals are foregrounded. Animal characters narrate their own stories that consist of their grievances of cruelties and indifference they face at the hand of humans. The human protagonist hears and understand these stories. It raises a question: why does he hear their stories? After analyzing the textual evidence through the theoretical perspective of Literary Animal Studies by focusing on Susan McHugh’s concept of animal narrative agency, the paper finds the answer that the human protagonist hears the animals’ stories because they underscore narrative agency. Unlike conventional roles of animals as metaphors and symbols for the making of human identity, these animals play an active role in resisting human exploitation against them. Finally, the paper claims that by offering narrative agency to animal characters, the author highlights the need of building an entangled interspecies bond among human and nonhuman animals. With this, the study expects to be useful for those readers and researchers interested in the field of Literary Animal Studies.

Narratives of Agency: Understanding the Refugee Experience through Paintings at the EU’s External Borders

Narratives of Agency: Understanding the Refugee Experience through Paintings at the EU’s External Borders

The Entanglement of the Human and Place as a “Storied Matter” in the Womb: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell

Ian McEwan’s (1948- ) Nutshell (2016) has drawn the attention of academic spheres as a modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet since its publication. That is why the novel has been mostly studied as a rewriting in which the existential questionings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet are attributed to a modern-day foetus. Employing a foetus as a narrator and protagonist in the novel, McEwan demonstrates the reflections of Hamlet’s existential crisis on a contemporary foetus who is oscillating between being human and nonhuman. As helpless as Hamlet for his modern-day problems, the foetus narrator talks about his consciousness, human side, morality and, most importantly, his role in this world which is devastating gradually due to various reasons such as environmental problems, climate crisis and wars. In that respect, it can be asserted that the novelist raises questions about human-nonhuman, ethics and morality through the story told by a foetus protagonist. Even though McEwan touches upon the environmental crisis through the foetus’s narration, Nutshell has never been studied from an ecocritical perspective. However, the foetus’s entanglement with the womb and the story originating from this bond are the instances of human-place entanglement. From the perspective of material ecocriticism, with the “narrative agency” given by the material environment, the foetus becomes the text that narrates his story of birth and becoming human. Accordingly, this study aims to analyse the foetus in Nutshell as a “storied matter” by emphasising the human-place entanglement in the womb.

The Semiotic Situation

In summer of 2021, a project began with Rae- Yen Song’s visit to the Print Studio, our first collaboration in some time since the pandemic1 began. Though social restrictions on how the spaces of the Print Studio were used continued, prioritising individual working and distance where possible, Song visited the Studio to begin conversations around print possibilities alongside a planned solo exhibition titled i in DCA’s galleries. These conversations began together with Annis Fitzhugh, Head of Print Studio at DCA, whose open- ended approach to collaborative experimentation in print as a method of invention is at the core of this research.2 Song introduced key concepts of narrative agency over the familial oral histories, memories and mythologies behind the exhibition, a sculptural environment based on what Song described as an ‘imagined dialogue with a long- departed grandfather...a being from another time and place, and my conversation with him addresses crossing, migration, loss, survival and labour’.

"Identity theft" in BRCA1/2: impact of positive genetic test results and risk-reducing interventions.

Individuals harboring breast cancer gene 1/2 (BRCA1/2) pathogenic variants are at increased lifetime risk for developing cancer. Learning one's BRCA1/2 carrier status is a watershed moment that can result in psychological distress, anxiety, and depression, as well as feelings of vulnerability and stigma. However, emotional and coping responses to learning one's BRCA1/2 carrier status and after risk-reducing interventions (i.e., preventative bilateral mastectomy) are variable, and existing literature reveals mixed and sometimes contradictory results. Drawing on the concept of narrative identity from the field of psychology, we sought to examine if "identity theft" (the sudden overtaking of one's narrative agency by an external force) may help explain the heterogeneity of emotional and coping responses following the revelation of BRCA carrier status and the subsequent medical intervention one may receive. This Perspective explores BRCA related identity theft using two case studies. Narrative analysis of qualitative interviews uncover the ways that patients experience the disintegration (theft) of their identity as well as their efforts to build and reintegrate a new BRCA carrier identity. This initial qualitative exploration provides preliminary support for the relevance of narrative identity and identity theft to hereditary cancer. We posit that applying the lens of identity theft may hold promise as a unifying concept, integrating across the variable emotional and coping responses among BRCA carriers. Employing a lens of identity theft may help inform the development of tailored narrative interventions as part of precision healthcare to support active coping and psychosocial wellbeing.

Colonial-Imposed Slavery and African Abolitionism: The Early Twentieth- Century Lagos Elites’ Campaign Against the Native House Rule Ordinance

ABSTRACT This article examines the efforts of early-twentieth-century abolitionists in Lagos, Nigeria who campaigned against the Native House Rule Ordinance/Proclamation, a colonial law perceived as perpetuating indigenous slavery in the Niger Delta region. The study enriches the corpus of African abolitionist literature by revealing how a network of Lagos elites employed a strategic top-down approach to advocate for the law's repeal, which they believed sustained a form of slavery instituted by British colonialism. The research utilizes an extensive range of primary sources, including local Nigerian newspaper publications, correspondence, petitions, and archival documents from both Nigerian and British repositories. The paper contextualizes the Native House Rule system, explores the Lagos campaigners’ strategies and arguments against the ordinance, and discusses the law's amendment and eventual repeal. Through detailed case studies and the examination of African-led initiatives, the study acknowledges the previously understated contributions of African activists, thereby rectifying a significant oversight in historical literature. This paper underscores the importance of recognizing indigenous agency in historical narratives, particularly in the context of abolition and resistance to colonial policies.

HISTORICAL ACTION AND NARRATIVE IN THE CONTEXT OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN RICOEUR AND RANCIERE

The argument of this study is that a critical encounter between the ‘historiographical’ texts of Ricoeur and Rancière on the theme of historical action and narrative provides us with a fruitful approach to the political stakes of the act of writing history. More specifically, I claim that attention to how these two authors frame narrative agency in the construction of our identities in history reveals two points of salience that give orientation to our attitude toward history, namely, disruption and harmony. Framing history as a problem in this way makes visible the centrality of how to conceive agency within the two poles of modern existence: on the one hand, statistical regularities that govern behavior in the form of impersonal forces and, on the other, individual projects, the trajectories of which form a coherent life (and define autonomy for the subject). The merit of narrative history is to bridge these poles; but it thereby occludes the antagonisms characteristic of modernity. It is in order to make these visible that we need a disruptive attention to the way narratives are constructed retrospectively.

Looking for Safe Haven in a City Torn Apart by War: Narratives of agency from internally displaced persons in the southern Philippines

In this paper, I interrogate the dominant representation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian discourse as helpless victims in need of rescue. Based on the stories of IDP women and gender diverse individuals in the Philippines affected by the Zamboanga City siege in 2013, I illustrate how they exercised agency to shape their trajectories of displacement. The capacity of Filipino IDPs to contend with their displacement is shaped by their power as bakwit (evacuees), and by their class and ethnoreligious identities. While Christian Filipino IDPs had access to material, financial, and social resources, allowing them to engage in temporary migration after displacement, Muslim Filipino IDPs with limited access to these same resources found themselves in unwanted mobility and prolonged situations of displacement. Yet, Muslim Filipino IDPs do not lack agency, as they continue to actively and consciously forge new strategies to regain a sense of home in extended exile. Ultimately, while identifying bakwit power as a useful conceptual tool to make legible how IDPs exercised control at different stages of their displacement, embracing such a framework should not negate the long history of political violence in the region that continues to keep some people on the move.

Exploring Student Agency in Narratives of English Literacy Events across School Subjects

In contemporary academia, English-language reading assignments are prevalent, even in contexts where English is not the primary medium of instruction nor the local language. This presents a challenge for students with English as a foreign language (EFL) who seek to pursue a university education in their home country. This study investigates the presence of English literacy events in Swedish upper secondary schools outside of English classes and explores their implications for university readiness and educational equity. Using survey data from 163 EFL students and qualitative content analysis, students’ written comments revealed a notable absence of English literacy events in non-English subjects, with limited exposure to written English texts and occasional use of multimodal English activities. The findings underscore disparities in students’ opportunities to engage with academic English literacy practices, primarily influenced by individual factors. This paper delves into the interplay between individual dimensions, and institutional and social practices, in shaping student agency in English academic literacy practices.

‘All brilliant gloss’: the liminal visual in Softley’s The Wings of the Dove

Abstract This article examines Ian Softley’s 1997 adaptation of Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove as a study in the representation of liminal sociocultural moments, specifically through its infusive representation of the character of Aunt Maud, played in the film by Charlotte Rampling. James’s Maud is the financial centre of the narrative, a complex and contradictory weaponization of philistine convention and vulgar immorality, a collage of surfaces repeatedly described as gloss on a double-sided coin. James felt that the diffusiveness of Maud’s power was the novel’s structural problem, because it inhabited a liminal space where the desires of the individual coextend with the desires of the market, and thereby dislocated the centre of critique and control in the text, moving the reader further and further away from the commercial trappings of their cultural moment. The filmmakers claimed that eliminating Maud allowed them to update the novel’s language, costumes, etiquette, and environment for a younger audience, but the film was dismissed as a pandering cash grab, an attempt to make Henry James a brand. In this way, the film diminishes Maud’s presence but empowers her narrative agency; resituating James’s brand of displacement, alienation, and loss into a liminal environment makes Maud’s commercial influence so inescapable and self-reflexive that it makes the film look like one of her many enterprises.

‘Yes, and’ and ‘No, although’: Inviting dissent and difference towards agency as part of multi-representative practice in actor training

UK based actor trainings often emphasise the acceptance of offers from others, ensconced in the common facilitation of ‘yes, and’. Additionally, there is frequently an assumption that trainings will be unquestioningly consumed by students and will benefit their work as performers. But are these assumptions ethical, beneficial, and correct? What happens when actors are invited to dissent to trainings? I argue that the assumption of consent is not always ethical, and that setting up a structure that invites dissent and difference allows for a return to agency in training. As such, this writing seeks to offer ethos of and practices for inviting dissent, difference and consent in actor training towards the recognition of narrative agency. I will analyse the use of these practices in a case study to demonstrate the use and impact of inviting dissent and difference. These practices are ensconced in the addition of the phrase; ‘no, although’ with ‘yes, and’. ‘No, although’ is the recusal from one thing in lieu of a self-made suggestion. This invites dissent and choice, maintaining both participation and autonomy. Students self-define their roles in the making of work, and make sense of ways to participate, enabling them agency in work together towards a common creative goal. In this is a broader need to dissolve structures of power that may present in the room, which helps invite the freedom to dissent and self-differentiate. As such, I will articulate intersectional feminist practices for community as a framework within which the invitation to dissent and self-differentiate are more easily received.

Making a Narrative of Repetition: Diachronicity and the Second-Person Address in YouTube's Routine Videos

ABSTRACT This article seeks to explain the tellability of routine videos on YouTube. It examines two videos by two motivational videobloggers, Kalyn Nicholson and Aileen Xu, whose channels include several videos based on the blogger's daily routine. The article suggests that contrary to generally accepted narrative-theoretical views, telling about a routine can create narrative dynamics without explicitly expressing singularity or uncanonicity. The article demonstrates how videobloggers make their mundane routine tellable under the pressure of the platform's commercial affordances and the directive of tellability by underlining the diachronic dimension of their actions. The article develops further philosopher Nils-Frederic Wagner’s [2021. “Habits and Narrative Agency.” Topoi 40 (3): 677–686] idea about the connection between identity-shaping habits and narrative agency by introducing it to narrative studies. This article uses a method that combines a philosophical approach and narratological text analysis. It argues that tellability lies in the diachronic dimension of routines instead of synchronic telling, and that the iterative narrative and second-person address in co-operation with YouTube's quantitative metrics indicate the masterplot of self-made YouTube success.

The #PantamiMustGo political activism: A textual analysis of narrative agency in protest discourse

This study analyses the narrative structure of the #PantamiMustGo hashtag activism in Nigeria. Applying qualitative textual analysis, the study examines the issues that were made salient in the protests and how they were constructed. Through the analysis of narrative agency, the study finds that activists constructed Ali Pantami as a threat to national security and called for his resignation. Two discourse structures were salient in the discursive construction of Ali Pantami and the Buhari government, namely the use of comparison to link the past with the present and the use of labelling as means of constructing social and political insecurity in Nigeria. This study contributes to stressing the role of social media in political activism through narrative agency analysis in the process of negotiating change by people who feel threatened by the apparatus of the state.

A Virtual Battlefield for Embassies: Longitudinal Network Analysis of Competing Mediated Public Diplomacy on Social Media

ABSTRACT Mediated public diplomacy is a critical way of strategic communication for governments to influence global public opinion, especially during international conflicts. Based on the theories of mediatization and digitalization as well as the layered model of communicative space, this study investigates how the United States and Iranian embassies competed on the Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo over 13 months. Following a network ethnography approach, this study conducts longitudinal network analysis and textual analysis. The findings suggest that the macro-layer function (i.e. hashtag) facilitated horizontal dissemination of news about the US-Iran conflict from mainly China’s state-media accounts, increasing public awareness of the issue within a short time. The meso-layer (repost and follower network) and micro-layer (mention and comment) functions helped establish vertical communication facilitated by opinion leaders and crowd-enabled leaders that perpetuated public attention on relevant issues. The two embassies engaged with the Chinese public in different communicative layers. The US embassy interacted with the Chinese publics through reposts and replies, while the Iranian embassy constructed their posts in the form of replies. The Iranian embassy leveraged China’s state media agendas as narrative agency to conduct diplomatic communication by incorporating relevant hashtags in their posts. A layered model of mediated public diplomacy is proposed. The findings deepen our understanding of competing mediated public diplomacy, and contribute to the field of international communication of international conflicts.